(L-R): Luca De Biase (@lucadebiase), Beatrice Lugger (@BLugger), Bahar Golipour (@Alterwired), Maria Daly (@maria_daly), Frank Swain (@SciencePunk) and Hillary Rosner (@hillaryrosner)

Professor of chemistry Paul Chirik is on a mission to turn lead into gold. Or, to be more precise, to make lead act like gold. Precious metals are instrumental to some of the most widespread and important chemical processes in our world, such as the osmium needed to synthesise fertiliser (so valuable that BASF bought up the entire world’s stock at one point), and the platinum needed to make jeans bendable, shoes sturdy, and envelopes sticky. The problem is that precious metals tend to be, well, precious. Not only that, but turbulent markets and rampant speculation cause huge fluctuations in their price, impacting on the products that depend on their use as catalysts.

Precious metals tend to operate in the realms of two electron transfers, while “base” metals only operate a single electron transfer. Two electrons good in this case; single-electron transfer is responsible for all the chemistry you hate, like the free radicals in your body and the rust in your car. To get around this problem, nature engineered complex electron transport chains carried out by enzymes to produce the molecules it needs without relying on the rarer elements. Chrik is following in these footsteps, developing ways to get cheap metals like iron work like platinum, replacing the more expensive of the two in common industrial reactions.

The technique offers huge advances for sustainable chemistry. A molecule Chirik developed, when added in 1% solution to herbicide, forced it to spread over leaves instead of forming droplets. This meant 90% less was needed to treat the same area! It’s not always simple of course – a replacement envelope glue designed by Chirik was rejected because nobody wanted to lick a black gumming strip (a more appeasing colour was developed).

Twitter: @SciencePunk

What a the chance to listen to Paul Chirik who is one of the world’s pre-eminent inorganic chemists at the intersection of the traditional disciplines of organic and inorganic chemistry focused on sustainability. Paul Chirik from Princeton University, USA, is known as the guy who is breaking some of the toughest chemical bonds, like the strong triple bond (N≡N) that connects the two nitrogen atoms. He is seeking for solutions that on one hand might allow us to maintain (most of) our living standards and comforts but reducing waste, pollution, the use of hazardous substances and energy consumption at the same time via new chemical reactions. This is part of the philosophy of green chemistry and sustainability.

Pharmaceuticals, moonboots, envelopes of fuel cells – they are all molecules out of the lab/industry. “We need to make them in a sustainable way”, Chirik says. Therefore Chirik and his research team are trying to discovering new transition metal catalyzed reactions that reduce energy consumption, minimize byproducts and waste streams, by a replacement of heavy metals in organic synthesis and catalysis with earth abundant elements. “Nature itself doesn’t use expensive metals for its reactions, but often iron instead”, so Chirik.

For example Platinum is a pretty rare and expensive metal of which mankind needs 8,6 million ounces per year for cars (as a catalyst) and 3 million ounces for jewelry. Now Chirik becomes the alchemist, which in former times meant someone who (never) could make gold from lead. Chirik is not interested in producing gold. But he wants to use cheap iron instead of expensive and rare metals such as platinum for plenty of chemical reactions.

The range of these new reactions with iron instead of platinum is pretty broad. Making biodiesel from plant extracts.  Production of silicon chips, cosmetic stabilizers, a certain herbicide against most in New Zealand and more. This are concrete steps to make chemical production more sustainable.

Twitter: @BLugger

Ingrid Daubechies talked about how current computation does not capture reality well. Her work includes improving functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) which is used in brain scanning. Daubechies showed us that individual brains do not fold identically. This causes a problem to neuroscientists who are trying to study brain function. Typically, data is taken from the fMRI and inflated to get rid of all wrinkles but doing this distorts the data. Instead, building wavelets models to localize data on each individual cortex allows more precise results.

Daubechies explained that currently objects that are scanned result in a cloud of points which triangulate the surface. This causes many problems with accuracy of the scan. In an unusual application of scientific research, wavelets were used to determine the under-drawing classifications of seven Goossen van der Weyden paintings (an early 16^th century Flemish painter). Under-drawings are studied by art historians to determine if the master worked on the painting. Daubechies was able to distinguish the correct under-drawing class for all paintings given blind datasets.

When applied to biology her wavelets are promising to improve the study of phenotypes such as bone developement. Currently biologists carefully defined anatomical correspondence points (landmarks) which is very time consuming. Utimately Daubechies hopes to develop a method when landmarks are no longer needed. (See recent article on this research: PNAS October 2011).

Twitter: @maria_daly

Extremely innovative talk by Ferenc Krausz about how attophysics captures the fastest phenomena of the microcosm. It included a demonstration on capturing fast motion using a drill & flashing light:

Twitter: @maria_daly

I’ve watched a lot of climate models run, but never before had I seen one set to live musical accompaniment. Until now, that is–thanks to Alejandro Litovsky of Earth Security Initiative, a UK-based group that’s calling attention to the link between environmental crises and security risks. Litovsky brought along his friend Anders Scherp, who played guitar and sang a slightly haunting ballad as an NCAR model displayed rainfall patterns.

Litovsky’s point was that we need a radical shift in how we understand risk, and how that understanding translates into financial policy. Changing patterns of rainfall in the Amazon, for instance, will have a big impact on Brazil’s energy security since the country relies heavily on hydropower. But, said Litovsky, traditional investment risk models don’t understand “systemic risk”–so they don’t take into account how deforestation changes rainfall patterns in the Amazon as a whole, and how that in turn will influence Brazil’s electricity production.

So how to better communicate this type of interconnectedness? Litovsky proposed “a little experiment,” a way to “try to understand how does it all fit together and what does it mean in terms of the earth’s security.” The remaining minutes of his talk were taken up by Scherp’s musical accompaniment to the climate model. I couldn’t agree more with Litovsky’s point that disruption of the Earth’s systems represents a real security threat, and one which we desperately need to communicate and address. The music, said Litovsky, is meant to move us emotionally rather than rationally. I’m not sure it quite worked for me, but he might be onto an interesting idea.

Twitter: @hillaryrosner

Let’s face it, having “messes” listed as a research specialism on your business card is pretty neat.  But Horn is exactly that, a man who studies messes, or more accurately “inter-related sets of problems”, particularly because business and government strategies are often hatched in the midst of messes.  Starting out with the war on drugs, Horn shows how the issue is fed from a dizzying number of sources: everything from the rate of high-school dropout to war on the streets of Mexico.  And this leads to Horn’s mantra, writ large on the towering screen behind him: “Don’t treat a social mess as a regular problem”.

To make sense of messes such as these, Horn creates visual aids.  But these are no ordinary powerpoint presentations.  Commissioned to help develop Britain’s 12,000 year plan for the disposal of nuclear waste, Horn and his team created a mural that spanned fifty years into the past and a million into the future, containing hundred of images and word boxes.  A similar mural was created for the World Council on Sustainable Development, to illustrate a roadmap for achieving a more equal society by 2050.  In “backcasting” (a technique Horn describes as imagining the ideal future and looking backwards, year by year, to visualise what would need to be in place to lead there), the final mural was 40 feet wide and contained 70 measures of success, 350 milestones and 250 visual elements.

Horn says this kind of mega-infographic can illustrate multiple points of view, patterns, and context that helps to facilitate the type of group processes needed to solve some of our most intractable – and intricate – problems.

Twitter: @SciencePunk

The session dedicated to economics is hosted by Dennis Snower, Professor of Economics, Chair of Economic Theory, University of Kiel, President of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy , Germany. He chooses a big question: what are the economic walls that prevent us from co-operating in solving global problems? «Fortunately new models are being developed to understand this». We are generating new problems all the time. Food, energy, security… The market seems unable to solve those problems. Co-operation is the answer. And co-operation is only possible if we understand the means to achieve it.

Stewart Wallis, Executive Director at nef (the new economics foundation), London, talks about breaking the Wall of Misleading National Indicators. How Economics Can Measure Real Progress? He says that what gets measured can be done. And he says that we are measuring the wrong things. Ecosystems are integrated, decline in global resources is clearly happening: thus economies are unstable. Societies are unfair: thus people are unhappy. Robert Kennedy famously said that the only things that make life worth living are not measured in the Gdp. Personal flourishing depends on five behaviours: connect, be active, take notice, keep learning, give. These are the most uneconomic behaviours but they are the key to wellbeing. Which depends also on external conditions, such as unemployment, or environmental quality. But wellbeing is probably going to be more and more important, perhaps more importan than Gdp. Costa Rica is a country where people live as long as in the United States and is greener than most countries in the world. That’s the direction we want. How do we change the central dynamics to have better lives? By changing the way we measure efficiency and productivity, taking into account overconsumption. This means to start a great transition. We will have different things to measure and this will lead to a different set of objectives for the economy.

Liu Olin, Executive Director, Research Department, China International Capital Corporation Limited (CICC). She talks about breaking the Wall of Global Debt. How Economics Can Reshape the Development Models of Europe, the US and China. What makes the global debt issue so complex? In the last two years the problem has grown more and more important. Greece is very small but it seems linked to bigger countries like Italy and Spain, in terms of debt. Greece and maybe Portugal are into the unsustainable debt problem. Others are into a liquidity problem. Markets want to see more fundamental decisions than finding liquidity. Cutting the debt can lead down growth, which could block the very possibility of cutting the debt in the long term. The solution will be external support? External supporters will want to be paid for that. The market want to know what will happen. There is a solution: not only liquidity, not only default, but a road map. The solution is to establish a road map for growth. A bigger Europe able to define its future. Without change Europeans will give away good money to pay for bad money. There are long term reforms that are to become the rule for every part of Europe: no more treaties written as gentlemen agreements, which work only if everything goes well but are broken when things go wrong. Real rules enforced to follow a real road map to the future.

Wang Hui, Professor, Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. He talks about breaking the Wall of Social Divide. How Political, Economic and Social Critique identifies the Five Faces of Equality. Social divide is a wide human issue: it is a problem that is important in all parts of the world, both in Europe and in China. There are different approaches to deal with this problem. Democracy, market, socialist systems have answers. But reality resists their recipes. Ancient Chinese philosophy teaches that equalities are different. It is impossible to demonstrate any recipe to be the best. But time is elapsed and the professor says that he has no time to talk about the fixes.

Robert E. Horn. Researcher at the Human Science and Technology Advanced Research Institute, Stanford University. He talks about breaking the Wall of Organisational Ignorance. How Visual Language Supports Decision Making about Wicked Problems and Social Messes. The largest issues and risks are linked to social messes, which are defined as messes very interrelated between them and other messes. Messes are described in diagrams in which you can start from anywhere and go anywhere else. And all problems are connected. The challenge is how are we usefully dealing with those messes. Messes are different from problems. Problems have solutions. Don’t treat the mess like a normal problem. The best is a visual description to this kind of issues. Case one: radioactive waste disposal. We created a very large information mirror: many elements, images and verbal elements, to see the form of the mess. Case two: the next 40 years. Many important experts were asked: if we imagine a good world in 40 years, can we actually get there? Answers where put together in a visual tool to show what need to be done. Case three: local messes. We start with a template of a mess map. Different groups fill the map. And a sort of order emerges.

Alejandro Litovsky, Director of the Earth Security Initiative. He talks about breaking the Wall of Ecological Risk. How a Cultural Shift in Economics and Politics Can Ensure the Earth’s Security. The military is usually thought as the solution to national security. But new insecurities, for example ecological insecurities, are becoming more and more important. Usually one thinks in a linear way: in a given society, traditional conflicts become more violent with more ecological problems. Reality is different. All ecological problems in the world are related: Congo and Brazil are part of the same rainforest system. A decision in Congo has consequences in Brazil. And of course elsewhere. We need to study these interrelations that have a great impact in national securities and have nothing to do with military force.

Twitter: @lucadebiase

Robert Schlögl is Director of the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society, discussing our reliance on fossil fuels. The problem isn’t simply that they are a fast-diminishing resource, but that fossil fuels still represent the world’s best energy storage system. We need to find new ways of generating energy, but just as importantly, we need to find ways of storing it. Currently the only way of efficiently storing energy is inside a chemical bond.

Nature has its own storage molecule – sugar. But it is a difficult molecule to work with. Schlögl wants to design new artificial solar fuels, that are stable and easy to build. Collecting the light that falls on just 0.17% of the Earth’s suface – an area 2.5x the size of Germany, is enough to meet global energy demand. Chemicals forged in a solar plant could then be manufactured into useful fuels in a solar refinery. The difficulty lies in designing something better than what nature produced in 4 billion years.

Generating hydrogen from water is one idea, but the platinum plates needed as a catalyst are not only expensive, but destroyed in the process. Schlögl says we need to develop new catalytic technologies. Nano-engineered materials that physically cradle the water molecules can help reduce the massive amount of energy needed to split them apart, and even operate as a production line for fuels, built molecule by molecule. (it’s at this stage his slides start to look like something from SpaceChem). The discovery and development of these materials will drive the creation of synthetic fuels.

Who determines the price of energy? asks Schlögl, and here I think he’s hinting at the massive subsidies fossil fuels enjoy that makes developing alternatives so difficult. To close, he challenges the audience to support the implementation of new energy options. “The starting point is here,” he says. “Now is the Big Bang in our energy systems.”

Twitter: @SciencePunk